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Geographic Publication Inequality and Bias: A critical review of the gender, politics and media literature

Jaemin Shim

Beginning with Kahn and Goldenberg’s seminal work ‘Women Candidates in the News’ (1991), the field of gender, politics and media has become an increasingly significant area of interdisciplinary study, the primary analysed content of which straddles the borders between political science, communication and gender studies. For instance, the literature frequently examines the gendered media coverage of male and female politicians in terms of quantity, tone and masculine or feminine stereotypes.

The media gender bias is crucial for politicians because voters primarily learn about politicians and political issues and develop criteria for evaluating them through the media (Brady and Johnston 1987; Lyengar and Kinder 1987). Relatedly, extant research demonstrates that the media’s gender bias can have real-world political consequences ranging from voter likeability (Bligh et al. 2012) to perceived viability, actual electoral performance (Kahn 1992; Kasadha and Kantono 2021) and even to future political ambition (Haraldsson and Wängnerud 2019). Reflecting the significance of analysing media from a gender lens, there have been related peer-reviewed academic journals—for example, Feminist Media Studies and Women’s Studies in Communication—in which pertinent research from around the globe is regularly published. Moreover, the importance of examining media sexism has reached beyond the academic setting. For instance, the resource portal Who Makes the News (WMTN) hosts the Global Media Monitoring Project and provides data on media coverage from its monitoring of multiple gender-related media indicators every five years since 1995.

Against this background, the primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the state of the gender, politics and media field based on published empirical works. Specifically, it investigates studies touching on the field’s primary concern: gendered media coverage of politicians. Three decades since the field’s inception, a large database of research has been generated. Reflecting the substantial knowledge accumulation in the field, several meta-analyses have been conducted lately to synthesise findings on the gendered mediation theme—for example, Sazali and Basit (2020), van der Pas and Aaldering (2020) and Winfrey and Schnoebelen (2019). However, a study that takes a step back and reflects on the publication patterns of the field itself has not yet been undertaken. This chapter fills that gap. I draw on the work of Jane H. Bayes (2012), who pointed out that the production of knowledge in the gender and politics discipline is not free from a Western-centric global hierarchy. Indeed, while recent studies show that gender research has become increasingly ‘mainstream’ in terms of the overall quantity of publications (Tsay and Li 2017) and its representation in top political science journals (Barnett et al. 2022), it remains to be examined whether the discipline’s increased saliency and influence have been driven equally by research from the world’s different regions.

In this chapter, I assess the extent to which the gender, politics and media field is built on research that equally represents the state of play across the world’s diverse regions, including Asia and the Pacific. To do this, I define the regional representation of this literature in two ways: first, in relation to authorship, by exploring the relative representativeness of this research; and second, by examining the content of the research and its impact, defined in terms of its visibility and theoretical contribution. In relation to authorship, I find that two-thirds of the scholarship produced in this field comes from authors based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and that studies by scholars based in the minority world are, on average, cited nearly five times more than those based in the majority world (following the definition of this volume, Western countries correspond to the ‘minority region’, while the remaining countries fall into the ‘majority region’). In relation to content, I find that more than 90 per cent of the theory used in this literature is drawn from references written by authors from the minority world; less than 3 per cent is derived from authors based in the majority world. Finally, I uncover that while the field has enjoyed increased visibility over the past three decades, research produced by authors in minority-world countries is legitimised more than that produced in majority-world countries.

My perspective in this chapter stems from my position as an East Asian early career scholar who has had to navigate the international academic job market in which individuals’ peer review publication record is the key currency. After completing my PhD dissertation on welfare politics in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, I shifted my focus to the topic of political representation for my postdoctoral project. In this field, I began to research gender and politics in East Asia, including legislative behaviour, career paths and media portrayals of female politicians. As I explored this research topic, I had to meet specific expectations for journals and requests from journal editors and reviewers in the review process, which motivated me to write this chapter.

First was the request to write more about the countries I analyse for the journal readership. I questioned why we should take for granted the readers’ ignorance about the countries I cover. As the journals in which I tried to publish increasingly reduce the word limit of each article, sacrificing the findings and methods for basic country context seemed to me unjustifiable. The second issue relates to the Western case–dominant theory build-up. Many journals expect a theoretical contribution and implicit in this is building on the findings published in other well-indexed high-impact journals or salient books published at university presses. I noticed these are predominantly based in Western countries. Yet, the findings derived from Western countries were often treated as generalisable at the global level and the norm was to build on them. With the help of bibliometric analysis, I hope the findings shared in this chapter make these implicit publication biases in the field more explicit.

The following section describes the sampling strategy employed to identify relevant studies in the field. Subsequently, I present empirical evidence demonstrating regional inequality in the publications using a range of descriptive indicators. I then present several possible explanations for this inequality and conclude with my thoughts on their implications and suggestions to improve the current inequalities in the field.

Literature identification: Applied method and sampling

To examine publication inequality in the gender, politics and media field, this chapter employs a bibliometric analysis. The method can be defined as a statistical analysis of publication data (Pritchard 1969) that enables researchers to systematically examine many publications in a research field over time. It complements the classical literature overviews or meta-analyses, the focus of which tends to be substantive findings on a specific topic. Bibliometric studies in social science and humanities are still rare, yet their share is growing—for instance, in political science (for example, Metz and Jäckle 2017; Kristensen 2012; Jensen and Kristensen 2013; Russett and Arnold 2010).

To identify studies in the gender, politics and media field, I used search function tools from the two largest global scientific citation databases: Web of Science and Scopus. These databases were chosen in view of their established status and vast coverage of scientific studies spanning multiple disciplines over the past decades. The following search criteria were used: 1) research published in social science or humanities fields; 2) research published as journal articles, books or book chapters; and 3) studies simultaneously including keywords related to ‘gender’ and ‘politicians’ and ‘media outlets’ and ‘coverage’ in the title.¹ This returned 1,993 studies from Web of Science and 1,702 from Scopus. I then removed duplicates between the two search databases and narrowed it further to only studies that fulfilled the following four criteria: 1) the study explicitly analyses gender bias in the media with politicians (either one or both genders) as the subject; 2) the author of gender bias in the media is a journalist; 3) the analysis was conducted based on traditional media, such as newspapers, TV and radio;² and 4) the research is published in English.³ This screening process was based on reading the study title and abstract and, if still inconclusive, the main text content. As a result, 222 studies were identified as relevant.⁴ The bibliometric analysis in this chapter is therefore based on these 222 studies, which comprise 212 articles and 10 book chapters.⁵

Geographical representation of authors

Underrepresentation of the majority world

Based on the full samples, I examined the academic saliency of the field over time. After dividing the total publication period into four eight-year intervals—1991–98, 1999–2006, 2007–14 and 2015–22—the result points to the increasing number of related publications. These samples suggest that the field has become increasingly salient over time. If the total publication period is divided into four equal time frames, the number of publications has increased significantly: 10 articles and book chapters were published between 1991 and 1998; 29 between 1999 and 2006; 66 between 2007 and 2014; and 117 between 2015 and 2022. The increasing academic salience echoes that of the broader gender and politics discipline noted earlier; and the publication growth rate surpasses that of the political science discipline (Shim and Farag 2025).

Despite this positive trend, the equality of geographic representation across the field is a separate question. To consider this, I examine the state of authorship inequality by looking at both the country of origin and the citation prevalence of this scholarship. As noted earlier, the primary goal of this chapter is to investigate the global publication hierarchies in the gender, politics and media field. Following the framing of this edited volume (see Jakimow’s Chapter 1), the reference point for comparison is between the majority world and the minority world. In this chapter, I consider the minority world inclusive of ‘advanced Western democracies’ and define it as the 19 countries of Europe⁶ and four English-speaking democracies outside Western Europe: Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the United States and Australia. Analyses hereafter will be based on this distinction.

An examination of the single/first authors⁷ among the 222 studies in the sample suggests that the field is not dominated by a small circle of individuals. In fact, 173 different single/first authors produced these 222 studies. Despite this numerical diversity, authors’ countries of origin are not particularly diverse, indicating that the field suffers from regional overconcentration. Here, the geographical location of the single/first author is assigned based on the author’s institutional affiliation at the time of writing. While the 222 studies are written by single/first authors from 42 different countries, Table 2.1 indicates that 65 per cent of the field’s scholarship comes from authors in just four of those countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The level of regional overconcentration of authorship resembles findings from other bibliometric analyses in social science (for example, Carammia 2022; Goyal 2017; Schulte 2019).

Table 2.1: Top 10 countries by author’s institutional affiliation

Rank	Country name	Proportion (%)
1	United States	38.3
2	United Kingdom	13.1
3	Canada	9.9
4	Australia	4.1
5	Israel	3.2
6	Germany	2.7
7	Mexico	2.7
8	Belgium	1.8
9	Aotearoa New Zealand	1.8
10	The Netherlands	1.8

Notes: ‘Proportion’ is calculated by dividing ‘the number of studies having a particular country as the single/first author’s geographic location’ by ‘the number of all studies’.

Source: Author’s calculation based on the samples selected for bibliometric analysis.

Under-referencing of the majority world

Regional inequality persists when we consider citation practices in the field. To do this, I examined Google Scholar citations for each of the publications in my sample and identified the citation numbers. The results show that studies by scholars based in the minority world are, on average, cited nearly five times more than those based in the majority world, with scores of 58.91 compared with 12.42, respectively. Even after considering the passage of time since publication (dividing the total citation numbers by the number of years since publication), the citation disparity gap persists: minority-world scholars tend to attract, on average, 5.62 citations a year compared with 2.24 citations a year for majority-world scholars.

Centrality of content

There has been an ongoing theoretical dependence on the scholarship derived from the minority world. In this section, I investigate this theoretical dependence by considering both the country focus of research in the field and the literature from which theories are developed and extended.

Table 2.2: Top 10 countries by study focus

Rank	Country name	Proportion (%)
1	United States	28.2
2	United Kingdom	7.6
3	Canada	6.9
4	Australia	5.1
5	Belgium	2.5
6	Germany	2.5
7	Aotearoa New Zealand	2.5
8	Spain	2.5
9	France	2.2
10	Israel	2.2

Note: ‘Proportion’ is calculated by dividing ‘the number of studies having a particular country as the single/first author’s geographic location’ by ‘the number of all studies’.

Source: Author’s calculations based on the samples selected for bibliometric analysis.

Scholars based in the minority world can, of course, study countries beyond their country of origin/location. This being the case, I was interested in the geographical spread of scholarship in the gender, politics and media field. For each study in my sample, I identified the country of focus. I found that 59 countries were studied in this sample, covering each of the world’s regions. However, as Table 2.2 shows, there is disproportionate representation in the most studied countries. While more than 80 per cent of the studies cover 23 developed Western democracies, together, the United States and the United Kingdom account for more than 35 per cent of the focus of scholarship. To put this in perspective, the gendered media depiction of US politician Hillary Clinton has been at the centre of 32 studies from 1996 and 2020 (almost 15 per cent), which is equivalent to the total number of studies covering 28 countries at the bottom of the frequency table appearing in this study.

Publication centrality: Country of focus and region citations

Examining how many countries are covered per study, the results show that just over 90 per cent of studies in my sample focus on only one country; 4 per cent compare two countries; and 3 per cent cover three countries. Comparing the location of single/first authors (presented in Table 2.1) with the countries on which their research is focused, these are not independent of each other. That is, 88 per cent of the studies in the sample focus on the country where the authors’ affiliated institutions are located. Moreover, an inward-looking bias was more prominent among authors from the minority world, with 97 per cent of these scholars examining their local contexts, compared with 68 per cent of those located in the majority world. Similarly, I note that there is a citation bias by region: studies that cover the minority world are more likely to be cited (with Google Scholar scores of 60.49) than those that focus on the majority world (16.27). This translates to a score of 5.80 citations a year for minority-world–based scholarship, compared with 2.38 citations a year for those in the majority world.

Publication centrality: Theoretical dependence

I also examined the extent to which each study’s theoretical section relies on references whose analyses are based on minority-world countries. To tease out the theoretical basis for each study, I considered sections labelled clearly with a heading (or subheading) that reviewed relevant theories rather than discussions of method, data or study implications.⁸ Most frequently, these sections of the studies in my sample are literature reviews from which authors derive theoretical expectations for their analysis. A total of 177 studies (80 per cent of the sample) clearly included a distinctive theory section. On average, these studies cited 33 theory-informing references.⁹

I further examined these sections by coding whether each reference cited is based on research from either the majority world or the minority world. I did this for both the authorship origin and the country of focus.¹⁰

Table 2.3 confirms the gender, politics and media field’s theoretical dependence on the minority world. More than 90 per cent of the theory used in this literature is drawn from references written by authors from the minority world; less than 3 per cent is derived from authors based in the majority world. A similar—if not slightly worse—trend is evident when we consider the country of focus of the references used to build theory in this literature.

Table 2.3: Geographic inequality in theoretical dependence of gender, politics and media studies (per cent)

		Minority	Minority and majority	Majority
Author origin	Minority	93.7	3.9	2.5
	Majority	65.8	6.8	27.3
Country of focus	Minority	94.6	3.8	1.5
	Majority	67.5	6.1	26.4

I considered two additional indicators of centrality: the inclusion of the country name in the study title, and whether the substantive text of the research pieces includes an explanation of the country studied. Figure 2.1 (top) clearly illustrates the geographic inequality. Studies that are focused on the minority world were less likely to include the name of the countries studied in the title (43 per cent compared with almost 94 per cent for majority-world studies). The exceptionally high proportion of majority-world country names included in the title could be taken as a sign of marginalisation, because it gives the impression that the focus of study is idiosyncratic, not generalisable and not mainstream. It is noteworthy that only 28 per cent of the studies analysing the United States include the country name in the title.

Figure 2.1: Country name inclusion in the title (top) and country description in the text (bottom)

The marginalised status of majority-world research is also demonstrated in the explanations provide for the focus countries in the main text of the study. I examined whether a published study had a separate section (with a separate heading or subheading) offering introductory information about the country of interest, such as the media landscape, women and politics, politics in general and/or the status of gender (in)equality (see Figure 2.1 (bottom)). Again, regional differences are apparent. Studies from the minority world are less likely to provide a separate country description (21 per cent), compared with 75 per cent of majority-world countries. Implicit in the inclusion of these introductory explanations is an expected or taken-for-granted ignorance among readers about the analysed majority-world countries and, conversely, an expected or taken-for-granted familiarity with the background of countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. As with including a country name in the study title, this implies the non-mainstream or non-standard nature of the majority world. Moreover, a separate country description within the main text could be problematic in view of the limited word count. For studies analysing countries in the majority world, an average of 630 words was devoted to introducing the country. Based on my calculations,¹¹ these additional words make up about 7 per cent of the total word count, which is not a negligible proportion.¹²

Visibility and legitimacy of authorship and content

Publication visibility: Journal indicators

Having examined the state of inequality in authorship and content centrality, I now examine the visibility of studies in this field.

To begin with visibility, journals publishing media gender bias articles have become more visible over time. Table 2.4 compares the average scientific journal ranking (SJR) of each of the studies in my sample between the time of publication and 2020.¹³ The SJR measures the scientific influence of scholarly journals by taking into account both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals from which the citations come.¹⁴ The higher the score, the more influence a journal is considered to have—for example, an increase of 0.3 between the time of publication and 2020 specified in Table 2.4 means that the journals publishing media gender bias articles have, on average, become more prominent over time. The scores presented in Table 2.4 are also differentiated by the origin of the author and the region covered in the article.¹⁵

Table 2.4: Academic salience of the gender, politics and media literature

			At the time of publication	2020	Difference
SJR score	Total		0.81	1.11	+0.30
	Author origin	Minority	0.89	1.23	+0.34
		Majority	0.48	0.56	+0.08
	Region covered	Minority	0.85	1.18	+0.33
		Majority	0.72	0.88	+0.16

Although the field as a whole has become increasingly visible, regional inequality is apparent. Journal articles written by scholars based in the minority world begin with higher SJR scores than those of majority-world–based scholars at the time of publication. Comparing the SJR score from 2020, regional inequality had worsened. That is, the magnitude of change in visibility is greater in research produced by authors in minority countries, compared with majority countries (+0.34, compared with +0.08; t-test p-value < 0.001). Similarly, the magnitude of change is much greater in research that looks at the minority world compared with that which considers the majority world (+0.33, compared with +0.16; t-test p-value <0.01).¹⁶

Explaining geographic publication inequality

Can the observed geographical concentration in the minority world be explained by geographic weight? To begin, I consider descriptive representation. Widely used in the gender politics literature and often referred to as ‘standing for’ representation, the term is often used to examine to what extent representatives mirror the sociodemographic characteristics of constituents such as race, ethnicity and gender (Pitkin 1967). In a similar vein, here I compare the presence of the 23 minority-world countries vis-a-vis 179 UN-registered countries for which I could secure the necessary data. Based on the most straightforward measure, the population size in 2020, minority-world countries make up 11 per cent yet represent 81 per cent of the countries covered in the gender, politics and media field. Given that minority-world countries are overrepresented by 70 per cent, population size clearly does not explain the current state of regional overconcentration in publications.

An alternative explanation for the disproportionate representation of minority-world literature might be ‘need’. For instance, research suggests that the elderly population incurs medical expenses greater than their proportional representation in society (OECD 2016). However, this is acceptable because they are more likely to fall ill due to their age and, as a result, are in greater need of medical attention. Likewise, regional publication inequality may be explained based on the state of gender inequality in the minority world compared with the majority world. To verify the need-based explanation, I examined the gender inequality index (GII) (UNDP 2019) and gender equality in the news media index (GEM 6) (Färdigh et al. 2020). The former measures global gender inequality based on reproductive health, empowerment and labour market inequality (the lower the score, the more equal are genders). The latter measures global gender equality in the news based on women’s presence in the news and as reporters, women’s presence as a covered topic about the economy and politics and women’s role as spokespeople or experts (the closer the score is to zero, the closer is the country to gender equality). Table 2.5 shows the average scores and ranking for each index; and both clearly demonstrate that the minority world is not faring worse on either indicator.

Table 2.5: Gender inequality comparison between the West and the rest

	GII		GEM 6
	Score	Ranking	Score	Ranking
Minority world	0.07	16	–48.31	48
Majority world	0.38	92	–52.21	67

If this does not explain publication inequality, are there other reasons? A first potential explanation relates to language. That is, the countries with English as the dominant language (or with high levels of English fluency) have a natural advantage in producing more globally accessible studies. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the top-four countries in which the authors are based are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (see Table 2.1); similarly, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany are included in the top-10 countries (see Table 2.1) and, at the same time, their English level is categorised as ‘very high proficiency’, according to the English Proficiency Index (Education First 2022). Considering that the two major citation databases, the Web of Science and Scopus, primarily index studies published in English, the scholars who do not or cannot write their studies in English will be disadvantaged in terms of international visibility. And, for non-native English speakers, as shown by research in linguistics, writing a peer-reviewable scholarly article in English is a considerable challenge (Flowerdew 1999; Vasconcelos et al. 2007). To begin with, it takes more time to write in English and, to make matters worse, if the communicative convention of the author’s native language is reflected in English, this can be treated as academic incompetence by Western scholars (Canagarajah 1996). It is often financially burdensome for authors to write in another language and have their work professionally translated into English, particularly for scholars in developing countries or those without sufficient research funds.

Second, resource-related factors can also influence regional publication inequality. For instance, the authorship origin–based top-10 countries (Table 2.1) spend on average 2.5 per cent of their gross domestic spending on research and development (OECD 2020). In the case of the gender, politics and media field, it might be easier to gather and process media-related data in the minority world. For instance, having a powerful media search engine can facilitate collection of newspaper coverage of politicians. Moreover, in the minority world, there might be more classes related to gender and media or more gender and politics themes offered at the university level from which one can build the foundation for pertinent analyses. Institutional support facilitating international journal publications can be another advantage. Offering publication seminars by editors of renowned journals is a fitting example, and perhaps such opportunities are more readily available in the minority world, where most of the journal editors are based.

Conclusion

The primary purpose of this chapter has been to investigate the global publication hierarchy in studies examining the media coverage of politicians from a gendered perspective. For this goal, I applied bibliometric techniques to 222 related studies from the past three decades and compared the publication inequality between the developed Western democracies (that is, minority-world countries) and others (that is, majority-world countries). First, the chapter examined the publication patterns based on geographical representation and the result demonstrates a clear bias. The data on both authorship origin and covered countries show that the field lacks balanced regional representation. Minority-world countries, particularly English-speaking ones, have dominated the field. Second, and going further, the chapter makes clear the state of marginalisation by conducting an interregional comparison of publication centrality and visibility. Results show that studies covering majority-world countries tend to be marginalised judging by their heavy reliance on minority-world–based theories and the burden of demonstrating their non-standard/mainstream status vis-a-vis minority-world countries. Moreover, studies authored by minority-world–based authors or that cover minority-world countries tend to be cited more and published in journals with higher visibility. To make matters worse, the regional inequality in publication visibility has widened over time.

I regard openness and diversity as intrinsic qualities of the gender and politics field. As can be clear from the frequent application of the ‘descriptive representation’ concept in its research (for example, Wängnerud 2009; Shim 2022; Tan 2016; Childs 2008), gender and politics is a discipline particularly sensitive to the underrepresentation of minorities. It is also the discipline that first paid attention to the fact that multiple layers of minority identity—for example, gender, race, age, disability, ethnicity, class or religion—intersect simultaneously and reinforce disadvantage (for example, Crenshaw 1994; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). It is therefore imperative for the discipline to be aware of the extant regional parochialism and address it to avoid reinforcing the existing West-centric global publication hierarchy.

A field whose knowledge accumulation is based on a broader geographical scope would open itself to new theoretical insights, as well as solutions to present problems. A case in point is the emergence of numerous innovative works in gender and politics drawn from non-Western cases—for example, Bjarnegård (2013), Rai and Spary (2019), Barnes (2016) and Jones (2016). Moreover, global-level analyses are needed because we cannot simply extrapolate to the majority world what is observed in the minority world. For instance, one might argue that the media sexism in visibility should be less concerning since some of the latest findings drawn from Anglo-European democracies point out that such gendered visibility bias is either weakening or has disappeared (for example, Brooks 2013; Hayes and Lawless 2016). However, latest worldwide analyses including both Western and non-Western regions demonstrate that gendered media bias still exists globally and is often more evident in the non-Western regions (for example, Joshi et al. 2020; Ross et al. 2020). This must change.

Beyond knowledge accumulation purposes, geographical diversity in publications should be upheld to equalise professional career opportunities in global academia. Nowadays, publishing in highly regarded international outlets is central to academic careers and the measurement of performance in numerous countries around the globe (for example, Plümper and Radaelli 2004; Flowerdew 1999). For instance, at the institutional level, publications and citations in internationally peer-reviewed journals are crucial for determining the distribution of public funds to universities and research institutes. Moreover, publication performance directly affects the global university or department rankings to which prospective students pay attention.¹⁷ At the individual level, increasingly, publication in top-tier journals or presses is connected to faculty members’ salary level, promotion chances and teaching load (for example, Strathman 2000). If researching or being based in the majority world disadvantages one from publishing in globally recognised journals and gathering citations, it is natural for career-conscious scholars to avoid the majority region. This, in turn, can perpetuate geographic inequality in academic career opportunities between scholars focused on or based in the minority world and those focused on or based in the majority world.

How, then, can the field become more inclusive of majority-world authors and experiences? First, we must minimise the language/resource gap between the majority and minority worlds. Considering that English has de facto become the lingua franca of research and publication (Swales 1990), there should be more support provided by publishers for English editing and translation. Submitting papers or book chapters in well-written English is important to give good impressions to editors, who are the gatekeepers of the peer-review process. Not doing so often results in desk rejection. Recognising the importance of English writing, many publishers offer professional editing or translation services. However, the service fee is often beyond the affordable range of many scholars in the majority world, most of whom are in developing countries.¹⁸ In light of this, like differentiated pricing schemes adopted in conference registration fees—for example, by the International Political Science Association—I propose that the level of editing support should be offered based on the author’s professional status and country affiliation. In addition, publication-related seminars offered at major academic conferences and leading academic institutions can be made public using video conferencing tools. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many conferences in the past few years have adopted a hybrid mode of conference participation and video-recorded key panels. Some include publication-related roundtables by editors of key journals or scholarly publishing houses, shared with the public.¹⁹ Opportunities like this can offer valuable insights into the publication process, particularly for those who cannot easily travel to major conferences for financial or visa-related reasons.

Second, we must do more to identify and remove existing publication bias against the majority world. On this, as gatekeepers to publishing, editors and reviewers can play a crucial role. For instance, for empirical studies, editors could impose consistency when it comes to specifying the country or countries in the paper’s title. In this regard, the latest author instructions at Politics & Gender journal are exemplary in setting the requirement that ‘[a]uthors of empirical papers should specify the country/countries under investigation in the title and/or abstract’. In a similar vein, for empirical studies claiming or assuming broad applicability, the theoretical build-up and testing sections ought to reflect findings from multiple world regions. To establish this practice, both editors and reviewers must start treating geographical diversity in references as an important criterion of the study’s quality. Moreover, editors can conduct a thorough survey of potential geographic publication inequality with the submission data they have in hand. The evidence included in this chapter is based on published studies, so it leaves out those that have not reached the publication stage. With the full submission data, one can document important pieces of information by geographic region or country, such as the total number of submissions; review progress status—for example, desk rejection, rejection after the first-round peer review, acceptance; and the reasons behind the rejection—for example, ignores literature, too narrow, no theory, undeveloped argument. Going further, editors can conduct a more sophisticated analysis of whether the author’s country/region or analysed country/region affects their publication chances. For instance, Garand and Harman (2021) examined the relationship between the author’s country/region and desk rejection likelihood, and we need more analyses like this.

Third, we must actively promote and incentivise majority-world–based research projects and publications. For instance, there should be increased research funding for cross-regional projects collecting and sharing data at the global level. In gender and media scholarship, the Global Media Monitoring Project is an exemplary case in this regard. To incentivise this, major research funding bodies can explicitly prioritise cross-regional projects, including scholars from diverse world regions. Beyond data collection, more publication opportunities ought to be offered for cross-country collaboration. Model examples are edited volumes like The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media and Communication (Ross et al. 2020), which involves numerous authors from all major world regions. Another way to increase the presence of majority-world–based publications is increasing the number of journals that explicitly include geographic diversification in publication as one of their core missions. Benchmark examples can be found in the social policy discipline, which has journals such as Global Social Policy, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy.

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1. 1 More specifically, the search conducted on 17 January 2022 used the following keywords: (gender OR sex OR male OR female OR men OR women) AND (media OR news OR TV OR television OR press) AND (politician OR candidate OR president OR legislator OR MP OR lawmaker OR official OR leader) AND (report OR coverage OR portray* OR frame OR stereotype OR representation).

2. 2 Narrowing the sample to analyses of traditional media excludes new (social) media outlets such as Facebook, X (Twitter) and Instagram. The exclusion has to do with the fact that, for social media outlets, journalists do not have to be the authors of the content and journalistic norms and news values are not leading.

3. 3 Studies selected from both search engines were published in 23 different languages. However, English publication makes up 93 per cent and the remaining 7 per cent written in other languages is excluded in this study due to the linguistic limitations of the author.

4. 4 For the screening, I tested an intercoder reliability between two coders and came to high degrees of agreement, with Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient reaching 0.94 (p < 0.01).

5. 5 For books with multiple chapters with separate analyses on the media’s gender bias towards politicians, only the first chapter is selected as the study sample.

6. 6 Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

7. 7 First authorship is determined by which author’s name appears first in the list of all contributing authors.

8. 8 Where there was more than one section, I counted references from all relevant sections.

9. 9 Often, the same references are cited more than once. Removing duplicate references, the theoretical part, on average, had 22 references.

10. 10 I categorised references that did not have a clear connection to a specific country (or countries)—for example, purely theoretical works or experiment-based works—as ‘others’ and removed them from the analysis.

11. 11 The total number of words was counted using the online word count tool Word Counter (onlinecountwords.com/). For the country-level description, I copied and pasted all the words under the pertinent heading/subheading. In the case of total word count per study, I uploaded the downloaded file for the counting; for book chapters, I scanned each chapter as a PDF, used OCR function to make it text-recognisable, then uploaded to Word Counter for the word calculation.

12. 12 If we assume that the reference part takes up, say, 15 per cent of the total word count and exclude it from the total world count, 7 per cent increases to 8 per cent.

13. 13 The year 2020 was selected as the comparative year because SJR scores were available for 196 of the 212 journal publications (just over 92 per cent) included in the sample. More than half of the journals did not yet have SJR scores for 2021 or 2022 at the time of writing. Specific scores for each journal are available at Scimago Journal and Country Rank: www.scimagojr.com.

14. 14 A journal’s SJR indicator is a numeric value representing the average number of weighted citations received during a selected year per document published in that journal during the previous three years, as indexed by Scopus.

15. 15 Five studies examined both Western and non-Western countries in one journal article and were left out of the sample.

16. 16 The average year of publication between the minority and the majority worlds differed by 3.8 years for author origin and 2.8 years for covered region. Factoring the average number of years since publication did not alter key differences presented in Table 2.4.

17. 17 For instance, publication performance/influence are explicitly included as part of their evaluation components by the two most reputable global university ranking survey agencies: Times Higher Education ranking (evaluation includes citations and publication numbers) and QS University Ranking (evaluation includes citations).

18. 18 For instance, at the time of writing, the price quoted for editing an 8,000-word piece ranged from US$400 (SAGE Publications) to US$2,000 (Taylor & Francis).

19. 19 A model example is conference highlights offered by the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) through its ECPRDigital YouTube channel.